


Good Days

by laratoncita



Series: This Town I Live In [5]
Category: The Outsiders - S. E. Hinton
Genre: Birthday Fluff, Dysfunctional Family, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Multi, Post-Canon, Tumblr Prompt, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-25
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-15 20:34:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29689587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laratoncita/pseuds/laratoncita
Summary: “You see the beauty in everything, don’t you, Mathews?”“Someone’s gotta,” Two-Bit says.(Requests crossposted from tumblr.)
Relationships: Ponyboy Curtis/Original Character(s), Steve Randle/Original Character(s)
Series: This Town I Live In [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1310054
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Not all of these fit into my extended "This Town I Live In" 'verse but i didn't want to have 2 drabble collections and i think it's more annoying for it to *not* be listed in this series than for it be here and not entirely connected. so. here u go (ps i did not edit these sorry LOL)

First thing they do when they get to their new apartment in Austin is break in the bed. Seems like the longer they’re together the more they want each other, and while Steve knows that goes against the grain he’s more than content to know Lisa feels the same. Afterwards, they sprawl out in bed together, Lisa up on one elbow so she can reach out and stroke over his cheekbone, her expression plotting already despite how he _knows_ he wore her out.

“What,” he says, catching her hand and then, barely thinking about it, kissing her wrist.

She smiles. Not the Bernal one, the Lisa one: pleased, a little smug, like the cat that got the cream. She’s always smiled at him like that. Makes him feel like maybe he’s the prize, or something.

She says, “We got a whole apartment to ourselves,” like it’s a palace and not a little two-bedroom on the first floor, the garage an extra payment every month but big enough that Steve can maybe take some extra work there, should they need it. She got a job at one of the local universities, works in recruitment, and even though it’s barely June her first day is coming up within the next week. Steve’s got to find work, still, and it makes him uneasy.

They’ve spent the last year saving up for this—for _them_ , to live together wherever it was that they decided. That one of Lisa’s professors got her an interview down in Austin felt like a combination of luck—and also the culmination of all she’d done over the last few years. She’d said as much, whispering it between them back in December, before she drove down for the interview before turning right back up to Chicago.

Steve’s just a mechanic. Doesn’t matter that Lisa gets upset to hear him say it like that, or that she’s offered to help him go back to school, since the GI Bill would pay tuition and then some, too. He’s been back for years, has been getting better for longer than he and Lisa have been back together, but he still can feel the differences between them, sometimes. Sometimes it’s so scary he could suffocate, but then he’s got her in his arms like he does today, looking like she’s the luckiest girl in the world when Steve thinks _he’s_ the lucky one.

He’d rather not ruin the moment, though, so he says, “This you saying you wanna screw in the kitchen, doll?” and grins when it makes her laugh.


	2. Chapter 2

Sodapop makes the cake. Of course he does—been doing it for ages, for any reason, not just Ponyboy’s birthday. His friends from school aren’t from Tulsa, call him instead and wish him _Happy Birthday_ as the day wanes.

Steve shows up with both Bernal girls, his arm over Lisa’s shoulder while she grins at whatever joke Soda’s cracking. Vicky, hair wrangled into a braid, offers him two wrapped gifts, which he can guess at and can open up later. Darry’s got the grill going, smell of barbecue smoke still heavy in the air even under the taste of fresh chocolate cake, frosting too sweet like always.

Two-Bit cracks as many jokes as he does beer, and the night falls slowly and then all at once. It’s okay, Ponyboy thinks, that not everyone who should be here is. After, Steve and Lisa leave are the first to leave, Vicky waving off the offered ride home while in the middle of a game of poker between her and the remaining guests minus Darry, who said he didn’t play cheats. Soon, though, it’s late, late enough that it’s just Ponyboy and Vicky sitting out back on the stairs, sweaters pulled on as the summer heat fades to the night.

She asks him, “You gonna open your gifts?”

“Which one’s yours?”

“The purple one.”

He slips his fingers under the creased wrapping, paper falling to the grass easily. He can barely make out the title in this light, but he recognizes it as one that Vicky’s mentioned before, maybe on of her favorites. He smiles, says, “Still tryna get me to consider Nizan?”

“Yup,” she says, stretching her legs out in front of her. “I’m right and you know it.”

“Sure,” he says, tilting his head up to look at the night sky.

She says, “You have a good birthday?”

“Yeah,” he says, because it’s true. Nothing bad happened. But neither did anything remarkable. Not that Ponyboy craves that sort of thing, not really. He doesn’t understand the kids he’s met at school, the ones who talk about wanting excitement in their life. Pony’s tired of it. Tired of it meaning something different every time. He thinks Vicky might get it. “I mean. Been a normal day.”

Vicky hums. Considering. She says, “I might have another gift for you.”

When he looks at her she’s closer to him than she was before. He doesn’t move when she moves even closer, eyelids closing to the darkness when she leans in to kiss him. It’s the kind of first kiss imagined before the _first_ , chaste, close-mouthed, intimate for the way that Ponyboy can smell her perfume—lilac, he thinks, something like spring.

Afterwards they look at each other, and he says, thinking of this past summer, and this past years, and the new people in his life and the old ones that are gone forever, “Can you just hold my hand?”

She says, eyebrows quirking, “Yeah.”

And Ponyboy kisses her, this time, her mouth like a rose under his, and says, “It’s been a good birthday, too.”


	3. Chapter 3

The Bernal girls are thick as thieves. That doesn’t mean they always get along, or that Lisa approves of every single one of her decisions.

Like this one, Vicky freshly married to some mafioso from Matamoros, half the city present for her ceremony. She looked like Bianca Jagger, minus the hair, and Lisa had to send one of the workers at the reception to buy formula for her, handing Selina to Steve and downing champagne with Izzy Mathews at her elbow. The baby’s asleep in the backseat now, and they’re barely leaving the hall where everyone had congregated for food and drink and dance.

Steve watches her profile, the heavy makeup that’s smudged as the night wore on. She’s got a glass of water in hand, stolen from someone’s table as they walked out. She turns her face the slightest bit towards the window, and as they make it onto the main road she reaches out, puts her hand over his on the gear shift.

She says, “Let’s take the long way home.”

Home meaning her aunt’s home, of course. Vicky might have been living with her now-husband longer than they’d been engaged, but that didn’t mean Lisa wanted to stay there. Instead, the three of them—Lisa, Steve, baby Selina—are staying in the bedroom that Lisa lived in as a child, the walls soft pink with yellow crowning.

It’s not something they talk about, her early childhood spent across the border while Old Man Bernal built something new with his third wife. He came back for Lisa, eventually, but Steve knows the kind of man he is well. Not like his own father, but not anything better or worse, either. Just different—Lisa raising a sister all by herself, arguing with their father about what she could and couldn’t do. She always says things got better the older she got.

Both of them tend to say it doesn’t matter. What matters is that in ’72, Lisa graduated, came back to Oklahoma, and stole Steve off to Austin, Texas. Or at least that’s what Soda says. That’s what matters, though. They got out of Tulsa, found a nice rent-to-own property, and now they’ve got Selina. _That_ ’s home, now. Not just for Steve, but for both of them.

He says, instead of all this, “I can’t wait to go home,” and Lisa squeezes his hand.

“Me, too,” she says, and smiles, her serious facade for the night finally gone, just for him.


	4. Chapter 4

_The jungle air tastes different._

It’s not what Two-Bit thought it would be—of course it tastes different. The trees are different. There are all sorts of things being dropped every day. Rotted food on the wind, among other things. But it tastes _different_ like he was expecting gunmetal and got arsenic instead.

Tucked against his chest are a series of letters. Signed by his girl, the one he barely got to before he shipped out. He misses her something fierce, doesn’t matter how little time they had together to begin with. He wants to take her dancing, maybe. Wants to take her home to meet his ma and his kid sister.

“What’s got you dopey, Mathews?”

“What don’t?” he shoots back, Ritchie grinning already.

“This about that broad o’ yours?”

“Don’t disrespect my girl like that.”

“‘Course not.”

He falls quiet for a moment. In the darkness of the night, he can see the sky like he hasn’t ever before. Everything new on the other side of the world. Not everything so terrible, despite the things he has to live with.

“You see that?” he asks Ritchie. He grunts back. “C’mon,” he says, “look at those stars.”

“You see the beauty in everything, don’t you, Mathews?”

“Someone’s gotta,” Two-Bit says, and thinks that of the day he can enjoy it all back home again.


	5. Chapter 5

“You made me feel weak,” Tim says, but he’s not expecting an answer. He hasn’t been to his father’s grave site in years.

There was no real point; his mother stopped visiting around the time she met Mitch, and after Teo died there was no one to bring him. Why would they? None of them Mexican Catholics, who hold onto the dead as long memory permits.

This father’s been dead too long for his ghost to linger. Tim doesn’t know if he’d stick around in the first place. It’s clear Frankie was a good man, at least in the eyes of Tim’s mother. But her judgement isn’t great, and Frankie was a bootlegger, once, cursing the Shepard bloodline to this life. This hand to mouth existence, the dirty work that’s stained Tim’s hands.

What he knows is that after Frankie dies is when it matters what kind of man Tim will grow into. Is he his daddy’s son or not? Frankie’s memory in every corner of their home until he was peeled from the walls best as anyone could manage. His absence as sharp as his presence, though maybe there wasn’t a difference between the two.

Don’t matter that Tim will never be Frankie, or that he doesn’t know if he wants to be. That helplessness may have hardened him but it’s there, a part of him, too. He wants to blame it—all of it, the anger, the struggle, the desperation—on his father, on his mother, on someone he can make answer. He wants to at least pretend this life wasn’t inevitable.


	6. Chapter 6

I walk in as Angela’s chasing Curly around with a molinillo. They’re not paying attention to me, which is how I manage to get the thing out of my sister’s hand, though I grab it by the dirty part without meaning to. There’s spilled milk in a few spots on the floor, too.

“I’m pretty sure this ain’t how you make hot chocolate,” I say, and Angel whips her head back and forth, scowling all the while.

“Give it back,” she says, eyes narrowed. She’d be scarier if she weren’t a middle schooler with smudged eyeliner on. I make a mental note to toss whatever makeup she’s stolen from our ma later. “I was usin’ that.”

“To beat up Curly?”

“I was makin’ chocolate,” she says, only she says it the Spanish way, which explains the rich smell of chocolate and cinnamon coming from the huge pot on the stove. My mouth waters at the thought of a frothy cup of Ibarra. “And this tonto is tryna take some without askin’.”

“It looks done to me,” Curly complains. Now that Angel’s unarmed he sprawls into a seat at the table, expression nearly as pissy as hers, though he looks like he’s enjoying riling her up at least a little as he messes with the salt and pepper shakers on the table.

“That’s ‘cause you’re stupid,” she says, and I decide to intervene before they start throwing things.

“Alright, chiquillos,” I say, “let’s just double check the pot and—“

Figures there’s spilled milk on the floor that I slip in. And of course neither of them bother to help me up, too busy laughing like they weren’t just trying to kill each other, too.


	7. Chapter 7

It’s after the third or fourth time of Steve trying to hide his watering eyes that Lisa goes out to find a recipe book that might help her. She skips all the ones with aspic, finds one by someone named Claiborne from the last decade and hopes it’s got something she can work with.

Asking Steve what he likes is no good— _Whatever you want, baby_ , is his go to when it comes to dinner requests. He tries to help her, too, but no matter her Chicana friends and all the complaints the lot of them dealt with when it came to organizing, well.

She likes cooking for her man. They’re not married ( _yet_ , a tiny part of her brain reminds her) no matter that they’ve got the baby and have been together far longer than that. It’s just nice, she thinks, to show him that she appreciates him, and the easiest way is with a home-cooked meal that doesn’t make him go red from the heat it packs.

Vicky, when she eventually moves in and finds the cookbook that Lisa hates, no matter that Steve now no longer has watery eyes from her apparently excessive seasoning, _howls_.

“Your kids are gonna live off potato salad and meatloaf,” she says, like she ain’t half-white herself, and then sits at the kitchen table giggling while Lisa makes a pot roast.

Steve says it’s the best thing he’s had all month. Lisa’s only a little smug.


	8. Chapter 8

At first he’s not sure what to make of the hat. Or the gloves. Or the weirdly intense look in Vicky’s eyes.

“So you’re…gonna plant flowers?” Pony’s also trying to make sense of the bags of soil and compost Vicky’s just made him haul to the backyard. Near the space where Vicky intends to start gardening, the kids are busy trying to find earthworms. Everyone’s going to need baths after this.

“No,” she says, taking the tags off everything and then putting the hat and gloves on. The former slips over her face even after she adjusts it. “Tomatoes. Sweet corn. Maybe some squash.”

“We don’t eat squash.”

“ _You_ don’t eat squash,” she tells him, and doesn’t remind him that he also doesn’t like tomato—the texture’s all off. “I think it’ll be fun. Might save us a li’l money too, if’n everythin’ grows.”

“Right,” he says, “how much was all’a this?”

She wrinkles her nose at him, and he finally caves and ducks in real close to give her a kiss.

“The hat was on sale,” she tells him. He fixes it for her when it slides down her forehead.

“Looks good,” he tells her, and then lets her boss him around a little more so she can get her garden just how she wants it.


End file.
